The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate generally to the fields of flight planning and display systems. More particularly, embodiments of the inventive concepts disclosed herein relate to display systems and methods for acquiring and recording flight navigation and operation information.
Displays are utilized in a wide variety of applications including but not limited to medical, military, avionic, entertainment, and computing applications. In one exemplary application, displays are used in avionics to provide operators of vehicles, such as pilots or navigators, information relating to aviation events, such as aircraft performance, weather conditions, and air traffic control interaction. In some aircraft applications, instead of or in addition to analog dials and gauges, display screens provide the pilot with information about the situation of the aircraft, such as altitude, speed, and directional headings. Displays may also provide the pilot with navigational information, such as weather, no-fly zones, or other aviation events, as well as communications between other aircraft, airports, or other ground-based systems.
An aircraft's flight path is typically determined prior to takeoff, and generally consists of a number of known waypoint locations which the aircraft intends to pass over. When passing over such predetermined waypoint locations, flight crewmembers may manually review displays, dials, and other information sources onboard the aircraft to manually record certain aircraft or environmental data, such as the current time, fuel remaining, speed, procedures flown, temperature, wind speed, and so on. In some instances, prior to reaching a predetermined waypoint location, a pilot or aircraft crew member will estimate expected values for each predetermined waypoint location and then compare the estimated expected values with the recorded actual values to determine if the flight is proceeding as expected. Such data points are typically written by hand using a pen, pencil, or other writing instrument on a flight navigation log book. These hand annotations typically become part of the pilot's or aircraft company's permanent flight log record keeping. The records are often difficult to read, time consuming to perform, and prone to a great degree of human error. Upon landing the aircraft, these hand annotations are typically manually re-entered into a computer system, such as a crew scheduling system, maintenance system, or regulatory compliance database maintained by the aircraft company. Manually re-entering these values that were originally handwritten during flight of the aircraft is also time consuming to perform and prone to a great degree of human error.
A need exists for an interactive record keeping system linked to an avionics system of an aircraft and having a display system to provide and record real-time aircraft operational performance parameters and environmental conditions to pilots or crew members of the aircraft. A further need exists for linking the interactive record keeping system to external record keeping systems to accurately track an aircraft's performance and to comply with record keeping requirements.